There’s no reason you can’t be a pro at comping.

Comping, the art of taking part in competitions – either online or offline – is a fantastic way to bag yourself some awesome stuff worth hundreds of pounds for free. Not only that but it can be done from the comfort of your own home.

1. Enter high-value competitions

Surprisingly, people are more likely to enter competitions for cheaper prizes than for the expensive ones. That is, competitions to win prizes such as crisps and chocolate, instead of entering competitions to win prizes such as TV’s and game consoles.

In fact we see this in our competitions quite often, the amount of you who’ll enter a competition for a box of chocolates but don’t enter for a piece of tech worth £50+ is surprising.

Why do people seem attracted to low-value competitions compared to high-value comps?

Well we think the general consensus is that people feel their chances of winning big prizes are small because they think that so many other people will be going in for it.

The irony is, of course, because everyone thinks this way, more people enter the low-value competitions.

In fact, because people are reluctant to enter big competitions the lower value competitions are actually harder to win. Weird huh?

So now, armed with this knowledge, what reason do you have for not entering expensive competitions?

Especially now you know far fewer people enter them!

2. Make a list of all the competitions you have entered

To be a pro at comping you need to keep a list of all the competitions you’ve entered and come across.

This will make it a whole lot easier for you to keep track of all the competitions you have gone in for.

Winning a prize for a competition you have forgotten about is a nice surprise, but you don’t want to waste time entering a competition you have already entered.

3. Pick and choose your competitions

Don’t bother entering a competition for something you’re never going to use.

Only enter competitions for things that you’ll realistically get some use out of.

Some people say you should go in for everything as you can always sell things you don’t want.

This maybe true of something like a car, where the prize value is significant, but for smaller items you’re probably just wasting your time.

Plus you’re making it harder for people who genuinely do want that prize.

Your time is precious…use it well!

4. Make the effort with tricky competitions

Ignore those lengthy, long-winded competitions at your peril.

While we understand that this is a common thing to do, get ahead of the crowd and put in the effort for the competitions that require a fair amount of time to be spent on them.

Think about it – if there’s more to do, other people probably won’t bother.

Again, it’s something we find with our comps. The more we ask people to do, the less people enter.

This puts the odds in your favour, so put in the effort!

5. Create an email address specifically for competitions

While you can enter our competitions and be sure you won’t receive any spam, unfortunately not all online competition websites work this way.

By passing on your email to a new site you are opening up your email address to a glut of spam emails.

Get around this by creating an email dedicated to your comping needs and give your normal email address some breathing space.

6. Research the competition companies

It’s not guaranteed that you will have heard of every company that is running a competition, so if you come across one company which seems unfamiliar, make sure you check them out first.

Put their name + ‘spam’ or ‘fraud’ into your search engine and see what comes up. It may be that you come across a horror story or two in forums or even on newspaper websites.

A good barometer for whether a company is legitimate or not is whether it is listed on Companies House, the official government register of UK companies.

So if you are serious about it, check them out there.

7. Check the small print

Reading terms and conditions may be extremely boring, but when it comes to competitions it’s pretty important.

Often the competition provider is interested in your information and the small print is going to tell you exactly what they’re going to be doing with it!

Opt in and opt out boxes can be worded differently, so get those reading glasses on!

I comp regularly, currently averaging 2 wins a month. Normally just small bits eg my latest: a toot toot car (for my boys Christmas stocking) and tickets to the baby show at olympia. My best so far has to be a holiday to Turkey at a 5* hotel! I was in shock when I got the call!

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